Fans may be split about the value of David Fincher's Alien 3, but how would they have felt about a William Gibson/Vincent Ward version? Newly leaked concept art hints at the movie we didn't see.

Designer Lebbeus Woods, who worked on the unmade version of the movie, has posted some of his designs on his blog, along with an explanation:

These drawings were made-in Hollywood and Pinewood Studios, England-for a movie that was never made. The movie called Alien3 that was made and seen around the world was conceived and directed by David Fincher, and is notable for it's unremarkable sets and its unrelenting grimness. The movie I made designs for was directed by Vincent Ward, but ended in its early stages, when he left the project.

The story of the Ward movie was radically different, though it deployed the same basic characters, in that the setting was a religious colony that had escaped the earth and inhabited an abandoned commercial facility deep in space. They had adopted a Medieval way of life, without electricity or modern technology. The Ripley-Alien drama was to be played out inside this crumbling, artificial world. Under Ward's direction, this would have become something highly original, a movie in which the architecture would have had a central part.

Woods' designs - working from sketches from Ward (one of which appears above) conjures up a beauty that was absent from Fincher's movie... as well as a sense of "What if" about what Vincent Ward and William Gibson could've brought to it.